An elegant exterior that can hold up to the salt, water, and sun depends on tough materials and a well-detailed weather barrier

Ocean City sits on a barrier island that ranges from two to seven
blocks wide. With the Atlantic to the east and a narrow bay to the
west, explains Smokey Saduk of Haffelfinger and Standeven
Construction, homes are continually exposed to a salt wind that
eats paint alive. "Some of the houses here cost $20,000 to paint,"
he says, "and they're painting them every couple of years."

But even worse than salt spray is "sand pack" — wind-driven
microscopic sand particles that sift into every crack and crevice.
Over five or six years, notes Smokey, the fine sand accumulates in
joints, where it holds moisture through capillary attraction and
begins to rot sheathing, wood siding, and wood trim from the inside
out. "I have pulled stuff apart in remodeling work," he explains,
"and found the back side of cedar trim and siding rotted out all
around the windows, just punked out where it was plastered against
the wall."

That won't fly in this coastal market. With an average sale price
between $1.5 and $2.2 million per floor for duplexes, Smokey thinks
customers come to expect something more. In Haffelfinger and
Standeven homes, that "more" comes with attention to interior and
exterior details. But in a coastal environment, it's the exterior
details that have undergone the biggest changes.

ICING ON THE CAKE

Although they recall the hand-crafted woodwork of centuries
gone by, Smokey Saduk's exterior details are accomplished with
low-maintenance or no-maintenance synthetic materials. Siding and
corner trim are Wolverine vinyl from CertainTeed (www.certainteed.com). Eaves, cornice, door, and window
trim are built up with layers of custom-tooled Azek cellular PVC
board (www.azek.com), which needs no paint. Porch columns are
fiberglass-reinforced plastic Permacast from HB&G (www.hbgcolumns.com), and the large dentil blocks (or
corbels) under the soffits are coated polyurethane composite Fypon
from Style Solutions, Inc. (www.fypon.com). Deck boards are CorrectDeck, a
polypropylene and hardwood composite (www.correctdeck.com), and the railings and balusters
are a modular PVC system from Kroy Building Products (www.kroybp.com).

A Palette of Plastics

Until about five years ago, says Smokey Saduk, he trimmed his
houses out with cedar, painted white. "Then we had a house with
arched garage doors, and the radius was so tight we couldn't make
the cedar work as a top jamb. So we tried a plastic composite
— not Azek, but one of the earlier brands. And we found we
could bend it around to fit the door head. I thought it was the
greatest thing in the world."

From that start, Saduk has made the transition to using all
synthetic trim materials. Here's a quick look at the materials that
are now part of his stock-in-trade.

Azek. A cellular PVC material with a uniform consistency
throughout, Azek comes in both boards and sheets. Boards range from
1x4 or 5/4x4 up to 1x12 or 5/4x12, in lengths up to 18 feet. Sheet
stock comes in 1/2-, 5/8-, 3/4-, and 1-inch thicknesses, and in
sheets from 4x8 up to 4x20.

Virtually free of the bubbles or air pockets found in some plastic
composites, Azek tools readily with the same tools used on wood,
Smokey notes: "You can hit it with any router bit. But it is
floppy, so it's hard to run long pieces through a router table.
We've made jigs for our routers, and we mount the 18-footers on
long tables and run the router down the board."

TOOLING AZEK

Holding a jig-mounted router in his left hand and blowing
shavings away with a compressed air nozzle in his right, Smokey
Saduk tools a custom Colonial bead into the bottom edge of a piece
of Azek 3/4-inch stock. Next, he will quickly hand-sand the profile
smooth using 180-grit and 220-grit sandpaper, so the surface won't
collect sand or dirt. The tools used on wood or MDF trim for the
house interior work just as well for Azek board for weatherproof
exterior trim, says Saduk.

Dust and shavings will heat up and melt if they aren't blown away
from the spinning bit, says Smokey: "You hold the front of the jig
and the air gun at the same time and blow the dust out as you
go."

Easy to bend for vaults and arches, Azek can be bent even further
if it's heated: Saduk's crew uses halogen lights to warm up pieces
for arched casings or vaults. But it does have to be handled
carefully: Grit or sand between two boards can scratch it.
Typically, Saduk orders a whole house-load of Azek through his
local lumberyard, and the entire order is shipped direct. "Whatever
I'm getting doesn't go through three or four hands," he says: "It
goes from the factory onto a pallet and straight to me." And he
says a new type of board with a wood-grain pattern embossed into
one face is more scratch- and scuff-resistant: "It has a tougher
shell on it, and it doesn't show scratches."

For the carpenters on site, Azek might as well be wood, says
Smokey. "We use the exact same blades and saws when we go inside
and start working with MDF or oak. On any given day if we're
trimming the outside, and we get bad weather or something, we can
flip over and start trimming on the inside. A normal handsaw cuts
it fine. A $14 hand plane from Home Depot cuts it beautifully.
Coping saws, or any other traditional woodworking tool we use and
carry, all work. From a business standpoint it's great, because you
don't have to get set up with two different sets of tools."

Fypon. Ohio-based Style Solutions, Inc., bought
out urethane millwork maker Fypon in November of 2004, keeping the
Fypon name and adding Fypon's product line to its own line of
coated urethane millwork products. Still at the www.fypon.com Web site,
the company now offers a broad array of architectural elements
modeled on traditional moldings and trim accessories. The core of
the product is polyurethane foam reinforced with a hard, tough
adhesive; the primed, paintable eggshell exterior is a tough
polyurethane.

Though intended to be applied intact, Fypon millwork can be cut and
tooled to some extent, says Smokey. For instance, he has sawn
brackets in two, removed part of the thickness, and glued the sides
back together. Seams, like nail or screw holes, can be filled with
autobody filler like Bondo, then sanded and painted.

Permacast. Alabama-based HG&B is one of several
companies now making fiber-reinforced plastic architectural
columns. Permacast columns are load rated for up to 14,000 pounds,
although they are frequently installed around an inner column of
wood, engineered wood, or steel. Base and capital moldings are
supplied with the columns and are a polyurethane composite similar
to Fypon.

Permacast columns are supplied without coatings and are primed and
painted on site. Because the columns are impervious to moisture and
experience relatively little thermal expansion and contraction,
they hold paint well, notes Saduk, but the rough coastal weather
still takes its toll. "Paint should last seven years on these
columns before they need repainting," he says.

EXTERIOR EVOLUTION

Haffelfinger and Standeven homes typically stand on tight lots in
the mostly built-out existing neighborhoods of Ocean City. Homes
often hug the lot lines, with only a few feet separating neighbors.
Many of the houses are simple squares or rectangles to maximize lot
coverage, but you wouldn't necessarily pick this out from the
street. The company makes the most of each building's front
exposure, incorporating polygon bump-outs, barrel vault dormers,
carefully trimmed-out arches, and eyebrow windows (Figure 1), as
well as decorative porch details (Figure 2). Eaves and cornices get
layered trim treatments using profiled Azek, as do windows, doors,
and porch beams (Figure 3).

VAULTED WINDOW DETAILS

Figure 1. Eyebrow or barrel windows on Saduk's
polygon turrets are carefully wrapped with asphalt paper (top
left), then may receive a layered Azek face trim consisting of a
single radius-routed face piece, capped by an Azek radius upper
casing with a tooled-in bead (top right). Inside the house, barrel
vault window bay ceilings (bottom left) are also formed with Azek,
which can be painted like the other walls (on interiors, Azek is
less subject to thermal expansion and contraction, and paint is
also not exposed to weathering). Azek is also used to form vaulted
interior door jambs and pass-through window jambs (bottom
right).

DECORATING THE PORCH

Figure 2. The workability of Azek lets Smokey
tool dadoes into the back sides of boards used to wrap porch beams
(top left), so that the board beneath the beam can float free,
trapped between the two side pieces. This allows for a clean,
sharp, equal reveal and makes it easy to set the pieces flat. In
this case (top right), a second piece of beaded Azek is applied
tight to the ceiling of Azek beadboard. Inside corner joints where
Azek boards meet are coped with an ordinary coping saw. The porch
column is Permacast, and the capital applied tight up under the
beam is Fypon (bottom left). The column and capital were supplied
primed and will receive paint, which should last five to seven
years. Inside the porch, an entry door receives a decorative trim
treatment: The fluted door casings, head casing, small dentil
blocks, and cap rail are all custom-cut and -tooled Azek (bottom
right).

WINDOW HEAD AND EAVES DETAILS

Figure 3. Dodging raindrops on a showery New
Jersey afternoon, Smokey Saduk mocks up a window head trim-detail
option for his clients to visualize (bottom). A finished portion
nearby (top right) shows the transition from window trim to eaves.
This area uses a combination of materials: The frieze board and
fascia are custom-tooled Azek, the soffit is vinyl porch-bead with
a hidden vent slot, the pediment brackets beneath the soffit are
Fypon, and the window casing is snap-in vinyl trim. Rakes and
cornice returns are detailed using built-up layers of Azek with a
tooled-in Colonial bead (top left). Against the house walls, Azek
pieces are mounted on a hidden packer board of pressure-treated
plywood, creating a dead-air pocket to receive the ends of siding
pieces.

Although there's not a single stick of wood showing, the finished
homes hark back to the intricate woodwork of the Victorian or
Georgian periods. "I picked up a lot of ideas from Colonial
Williamsburg," says Smokey. "And I'm only half an hour north of
Cape May [a New Jersey seaside resort noted for its Victorian
architecture], so I am always down there picking up ideas."

Initially, Saduk's attention was focused on reproducing traditional
details in cedar. But in the last five or six years, he's made the
switch to all synthetic materials (see "A Palette of Plastics,"
below): Azek cellular PVC board and sheet stock, Fypon
coated-polyurethane decorative elements, and Permacast
marble-and-resin synthetic columns. The Azek is never painted; the
Fypon (which comes with a primer coat) and Permacast are painted on
site.

Impervious package. Made of impervious materials and installed with
tight, carefully worked joints (and even, in places, with
adhesive-welded bonds), Saduk's siding and trim package sheds the
majority of water that strikes the building in the rainy shore
climate. "We use no surface caulk on the building, because the
beach sand sticks to it and makes a black outline," explains
Smokey. The building relies instead on water-management details
buried beneath the siding and trim; this secondary weather barrier
is carefully applied and flashed before any of the siding or finish
materials are installed.

SECONDARY WEATHER BARRIER

The basic drainage plane material backing up the siding on each
house is #30 asphalt-saturated felt paper, lapped 4 inches at
horizontal joints and 2 or 3 feet at vertical joints. The crew
double-wraps inside and outside wall corners, extending paper 2
feet around the corner from both sides. Saduk has reason to trust
asphalt paper: "I've pulled off asphalt paper that was 50 years
old, and it was beautiful — and the wood behind it looked
brand-new," he says.

Corners also receive a bent flashing, made from foot-wide
vinyl-coated aluminum coil stock, which provides 6 inches of
flashing on each side of the corner (Figure 4). Any nails driven
through the metal (including the nails used to fasten mounting
brackets for vinyl corner trim) create their own seals, says
Smokey, so that wind-driven water under the siding can't reach nail
holes: "You're pinching the asphalt paper between metal and wood,
and you are essentially building a gasket around the nail
shank."

WATER-MANAGEMENT DETAILS

Figure 4. Impervious, no-maintenance claddings
are backed up by asphalt paper and PVC-coated aluminum flashings on
Smokey Saduk's oceanfront home exteriors. At wall bases (top),
asphalt paper underlies a pressure-treated nailer and beaded Azek
trim board; flashing and paper also cover the top of the trim
piece, capped by an Azek shelf. At wall tops, metal flashing is
applied before the upper nailer and trim piece (middle). The nailer
and frieze hold vinyl soffit material tight to the flashing and
provide a dead space for the top termination of the siding. The
vinyl siding clips into a mounting bracket at its bottom edge,
nailed above the skirt board's Azek shelf (bottom).

Windows. Window openings are also handled with asphalt paper,
double-lapped. The crew sets strips of asphalt paper under the
window, along the side, and (after setting the window) across the
top. The bottom strip is left free so that paper can be stapled to
the wall inboard of it; paper applied to the wall by the sides of
the windows laps onto the outboard face of the vinyl window
flanges.

As with the corner flashing, explains Saduk, mounting hardware for
vinyl window trim pieces creates a gasket effect (Figure 5) —
nails squash the asphalt paper tight between the mounting brackets
and the wood wall sheathing, so that a tight seal is created
surrounding each nail shaft.

WEATHERTIGHT WINDOW OPENINGS

Figure 5. Window openings are prepped with
asphalt paper before flanged vinyl-clad windows are installed. Side
flanges are sandwiched between layers of asphalt paper, while lower
flanges lap outboard of all paper layers (top). Window casings snap
into blind-nailed plastic mounting brackets (second); on the side
away from the window, casing pieces form a J-channel pocket to
receive siding ends. Casing pieces are notched at inside corners to
create a positive overlapping drip edge (third and
fourth).

Walls. At the tops of walls, the crew
runs the asphalt paper up to the rafter seats, well into the area
that will be buried within the soffit. Then a reverse flashing of
bent vinyl-coated aluminum is nailed over the paper, at the right
height to catch the vinyl porch-bead soffit material that the eaves
will receive (Figure 4, above). When the vinyl is installed and a
pressure-treated nailer is set tight up beneath it, the flashing
will help block wind-driven rain from pushing up into the soffit or
roof system.

At the wall base, Smokey typically installs a "water table" detail
— a built-up skirt board with a narrow, sloped shelf resting
on it (illustration below). The wall behind the skirt board is
papered before the trim is applied. Flashing is installed above the
skirt board, and an upper course of asphalt paper lapped over that,
before the 12-degree sloping cap is installed above the
skirt.

WALL SECTION
A beautiful exterior relies on good water-management details
beneath the siding and trim. Vinyl-coated aluminum flashing and #30
felt must be lapped to allow water to drain downward and to the
exterior and out. Pressure-treated packing beneath finish trim is
key to keeping the trim out in front of the materials lower down on
the wall to promote good drainage.

AN EVOLVING TRADEMARK LOOK

The total look has taken years to evolve and is still evolving,
says Saduk. "The first couple of years I wasn't making a lot of
money. But now, for a 4,000- or 5,000-square-foot house, we might
be doing a $90,000 siding package out of vinyl." The trim and
siding package has become a trademark look, he says: "We're
start-to-finish builders — we're general contractors —
and this has become a key feature of our buildings that people are
starting to recognize over and over again. It definitely kicks the
entire project up a notch."~

Ted Cushman reports on the building industry from his home in
Great Barrington, Mass. All photos by the author.